The two main drivers are bitcoin and ethereum, with the former finally reaching a new all time high today, while ethereum has been making new all time highs daily for all of this week.

The puzzle continues as to why bitcoin is rising considering its fundamentals, but it appears likely that ethereum is pushing it up as the ETH/BTC pair remains the most traded.

Although it may also be the case institutional investors might be moving into bitcoin to speculate on price movements or perhaps as a hedge in a portfolio of assets.

For eth, there are many reasons to explain its rise which we will detail further in its own article, but a newcomer has suddenly arrived, Stratis, jumping to a $1 billion market cap.

From some brief analysis, Stratis appears to be just a bitcoin clone with seemingly the only difference being that its client is written in C# instead of C++ because, they say, the corporate world uses Microsoft and C#.

They also have plans to implement sidechains, the Lightning network, and, seemingly, everything that Bitcoin Core wants to do, with the recent price move perhaps because they are working on Tumblebit, a transactions mixer and obfuscator.

Another newcomer to top 10 is Waves, a platform that plans to implement non-Turing complete smart contracts, thus limiting its functionality, but arguably potentially increasing its security.

Although, it is not very clear whether they are using the term smart contracts in a very broad sense as they say their planned smart contracts are “a more direct generalization of Bitcoin scripting.”

Interestingly, they are to implement Bitcoin-NG for scalability, a proposal by Cornell researchers which can handle 100 tx/s at 1MB blocksizes. However, they say this is suggested by Dmitry Meshkov, presumably one of their developers, so we’ll see whether the market thinks we should analyze the platform further or otherwise dependent on its price actions.

The top ten current digital currencies – image source coinmarketcap.

Interestingly, it’s a mixed day today for digital currencies overall. Unlike some days when they are all green or all red, today some are up and some are down. The overall market cap, however, is very much up, with most being in green, as the digital currencies’ great spring boom continues.